Collaboration means quite simply working together.

Everyone knows that as a general rule, "Two heads are better than one".  Learning to collaborate effectively with your colleagues is important in any business however small or large.

Small businesses often pride themselves on good communciation due to their size, everyone getting on with each other and creating  a family feel within the organisation.  This often leads to an assumption that collaboration, or working with others on a task comes naturally.  However, this essential part of business life rarely comes without a lot of effort on the part of team members and can therefore become informal and undocumented.

While much team work takes place face to face, it is becoming increasingly common to work with others via electronic media such as e-mail, tele-conferencing and file sharing through intranets. This electronic form of collaboration has many benefits from cost savings associated with travel to better organisation and management of projects.

Collaboration solutions have historically required a vast amount of in house knowledge, expense and ongoing maintenance to support. Technical expertise is needed to understand and deploy these complex systems, as well as the need to purchase expensive hardware with maintenance agreements, provision a secure and temperature controlled environment to house your hardware and to understand the licensing minefield. Making sure your company stays legal and understanding license agreements is essential for your business.  Ongoing support of applications is also necessary to make sure your information is backed up and secure in the event of a disaster.  Deploying an internal IT system can be very expensive and the decision to deploy solutions in house should not be taken lightly.  Because of these complications many small businesses have made do with inferior solutions that provide limited functionality. An example of such a solution is a simple email solution (POP3) and some web space which has more than likely been provided by the local Internet Service Provider free of charge.

Incontech can provide the perfect solution for small businesses by acting as the host for a powerful Personal Information Manager such as Outlook 2007 and a collaboration platform such as SharePoint Services.  At a relatively small cost per user, these services will quickly pay for themselves through improvements to team efficiency via true collaboration.